Theoretical Model Construction of Deformation-Force for Soft Grippers Part II: Displacement Control Based Intrinsic Force Sensing

Compliant grasping is an essential capability for most robots in practical applications. For compliant robotic end-effectors that commonly appear in industrial or logistic scenarios, such as Fin-Ray gripper, it still remains challenging to build a bidirectional mathematical model that mutually maps the shape deformation and contact force. Part I of this article has constructed the force-displacement relationship for design optimization through the co-rotational theory with very few assumptions. In Part II, we further devise a detailed displacement-force mathematical model, enabling the compliant gripper to precisely estimate contact force sensor-free. Specifically, the proposed approach based on the co-rotational theory can calculate contact forces from deformations. The presented displacement-control algorithm elaborately investigates contact forces and provides force feedback for a force control system of a gripper, where deformation appears as displacements in contact points. Afterward, simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed model through comparisons with the finite-element analysis (FEA). Simulation results reveal that the proposed model accurately estimates contact force, with an average error of around 5% throughout all single/multiple node cases, regardless of various design parameters (Part I of this article is released in Google Drive).